VIDEO: Government plans to force tech giants pay for news

SARAH FERGUSON, PRESENTER: The Albanese Government has set up a potential showdown with US President Donald Trump over its plan to make big tech companies pay for the Australian news they put on their platforms.

Here's National Affairs reporter Michael Rowland.

MICHAEL ROWLAND, REPORTER: For nearly one hundred years, the Greek Herald has been proudly keeping Greek Australians informed about news in their community and overseas.

DIMITRA SKALKOS, PUBLISHER, THE GREEK HERALD:  We advocate for our community. We serve as a voice for our community, and our readers actually have a sense of ownership to our newspaper.

MICHAEL ROWLAND:  Like all newspapers the Greek Herald has been facing mounting financial pressures because of a weakening advertising market which was why three years ago it welcomed funding from Google, under a Morrison government plan to force the tech companies to pay for the Australian news they put on their platforms.

In July, Google ended the deal two years early.

DIMITRA SKALKOS:  It was a shock to us because we didn’t really realise that that was a possibility, and I think it was a bit of a wake-up call that these social media giants or large corporations have the ability to do that even when they are tied into agreements. 

MICHAEL ROWLAND:  The Albanese Government is now trying to make things right with its ‘news bargaining incentive’ plan.

DANIEL MULINO MP, ASSISTANT TREASURER:  I just think this is a really important step forward because what it shows is that the government understands the critical role that journalism plays in our society and in particular the role that public interest journalism plays in the health of our democracy. 

MICHAEL ROWLAND: Under the plan all tech companies with Australian revenue of more than $250 million would face a charge based on a percentage of that revenue. 

They can reduce, or avoid the charge altogether, if they strike funding deals with Australian news businesses. 

DANIEL MULINO:  The reason we've set this incentive up in the way it's been set up is that there is a strong incentive for them to enter into agreements. 

MICHAEL ROWLAND:  The governments push to make the tech giants pay is being embraced by the smallest media outlets to the biggest. 

MATT STANTON, CEO, NINE: We welcome it. It was an election promise by the Prime Minister, and he said he has got our back on this one and it’s the right thing to do. So we welcome the consultation process and we’ll get into it with full energy. 

MICHAEL ROWLAND:  Nine Entertainment CEO Matt Stanton, whose business extends from a national TV network to some of the country’s most prominent newspapers, says the free use by the tech companies of Nine’s news stories has had a material effect on the company’s bottom line. 

MATT STANTON:  The impact has been, is obviously a reduction in our revenues. these are unavoidable businesses, and they have taken our content onto their platforms. What happens is we don’t get the revenue; they get the revenue. 

MICHAEL ROWLAND: Asking the tech giants to pay Australian publishers can be perilous, as the Morrison government discovered when it first tried four years ago.

Facebook was so incensed it briefly unfriended Australia, dumping all local news content from its platform, before reluctantly agreeing to pay up. Those relationships weren’t to last long with Facebook ending all of its local news funding deals early last year. The impact was immediate. 

MATT STANTON:  We lost circa 50 to 100 journalists out of our business as we re-based our cost base to be able to work through this. So it is a real issue. It stops us investing in journalism to the levels we’d like to. 

MICHAEL ROWLAND: Facebook, and its parent company Meta, has a track record of playing hardball when governments try to take it on. 

In 2023, when Canada introduced a similar news funding plan, Facebook simply removed news content from its website, a ban that remains to this day. 

ROD SIMS, FMR HEAD, ACCC: I have to blunt and say nothing surprises me about Facebook. They’ve set the precedent in Canada. 

MICHAEL ROWLAND:  As the head of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Rod Sims was heavily involved in drafting the initial news funding deal. 

In his job he dealt with all types of companies, but says Facebook took special honours. 

ROD SIMS:  Look, it’s hard to rank things, Michael, but if I am forced to, they would be the West Coast in AFL terms of the companies we’ve dealt with, so I am afraid they would be at the bottom of the ladder. 

MICHAEL ROWLAND:  The former competition czar believes the carrot and stick approach of this new plan will force the tech giants to play ball. 

ROD SIMS:  Without the news media bargaining code or the news media incentive, they would take the content for no payment. and in doing that, the media companies aren't getting rewarded for the journalists they employ to provide that media content. So, without this funding you’d really have to fear for media in this country 

MICHAEL ROWLAND:  Both Facebook and Google declined our requests for interviews. 

A Facebook spokesperson says: 

‘We will review the proposal and look forward to participating in the government’s consultation process.’ 

Google says it’s the only technology company that has maintained relationships with Australian publishers since 2020. 

The tech companies do have a powerful ally in their corner. 

MARK ZUCKERBERG, META OWNER: We don’t often get together, as the CEOs of the different companies, but it’s good to see everyone. 

MICHAEL ROWLAND:  US President Donald Trump hosted big tech CEO’s including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai at the White House in September. 

A month earlier the President sent a warning to countries who ‘attack our incredible American tech companies’. 

In the social media post he put all countries on notice, threatening to “impose substantial additional tariffs on that country’s exports to the USA.”

The Albanese Government is already moving to rein in the big tech companies by banning under 16’s from social media and is seemingly unfazed about picking a new fight. 

DANIEL MULINO:  Look, I'm confident that we can step through all of these issues and as I said, one of the things that we’ll be stressing is that this is an Initiative that is very different to revenue raising initiatives that have been raised specifically by the US government. 

MICHAEL ROWLAND:  For Australian media companies, tech giants running their content without paying is just one of the digital challenges they face. 

Artificial intelligence operators are also harvesting local news stories to feed into their increasingly sophisticated large language models, again without paying.   

News Corp has signed a funding deal with Open-AI but others, like Nine, haven’t.

Matt Stanton says Nine’s newspaper websites, like the Australian Financial Review, are being scraped by AI eight to ten times a second 

MATT STANTON:  It is like stealing. It’s like literally walking into a shop, a retail shop, picking a t-shirt up and walking out with it without paying for it. I mean that is pretty much the analogy, and I know people think that is drastic, but it is.

MICHAEL ROWLAND: Local news bosses say this latest move to make the tech giants pay up will not only improve their bottom lines but also ensure trusted news sources survive in this age of pervasive misinformation.

MATT STANTON:  It is absolutely the heart of our democracy. If we do not have that, we are going to be fed through stuff that is absolutely wrong. I cannot say it strongly enough: this is the heart of democracy and it has to be fixed.